Zwicky Transient Facility

Overview: The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is a new time-domain survey with first light at Palomar Observatory in 2017. Building on the highly successful legacy of the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), ZTF uses a new camera with a 47 square degree field of view mounted on the Samuel Oschin 48-inch (1.2m) Schmidt telescope. The new camera (16 elements of 6k x 6k CCDs) enables a full scan of the northern visible sky every night. ZTF's extremely wide field and fast readout electronics will enable a survey more than an order of magnitude faster than that of PTF. ZTF will search and catalog rare and exotic transients and its data will drive novel studies of supernovae, variable stars, binaries, AGN, and asteroids.

Links

Zwicky Transient Facility Homepage

The PTF and ZTF Science Data Systems are housed at IPAC. These consist of the data processing pipelines, data archives, infrastructure for long-term curation, and the user services for data retrieval. IPAC also delivers a transient event stream to the science collaboration and project partners to enable rapid follow-up in near real-time. IPAC scientists and engineers contribute significantly to pipeline development, quality assurance, and maintenance of the archive system prior to public distribution of the data. In particular, ZTF will accumulate data at a rate 15x faster than PTF and result in an archive exceeding 3 PetaBytes following its nominal three year survey. IPAC is currently devoting much research and development to handling such “big-data”. A major challenge is developing the tools to access and serve this data to the astronomical community.

Mission News

The aftermath of a supernova seen for the first time

News Release • January 10th, 2024

A team of astronomers from the ZTF partnership used ZTF and a suite of other telescopes available to the ZTF...

The weirdest of them all - a stellar corpse shows signs of life

News Release • November 15th, 2023

The Zwicky Transient Facility captured repeated energetic flares from a stellar corpse, a phenomena astronomer are...

Astronomers Discover Extremely Warped Supernova

News Release • June 12th, 2023

Astronomers have captured a bizarre image of a supernova, the powerful explosion of a star, whose light was so...

Radio signals reveal the origin of a supernova

News Release • May 17th, 2023

Astronomers from the Zwicky Transient Facility collaboration based at the University of Stockholm, Sweden have...

ZTF sees a star eating its world

News Release • May 3rd, 2023

For the first time, astronomers have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet whole. The sun-like star,...

ZTF makes first discovery of a rare cosmic 'lunch'

News Release • November 30th, 2022

Tidal disruption events are violent cosmic displays of a black hole devouring a nearby star. Astronomers uncovered a...

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